"Yet Lozano, now 37, has by all appearances turned her life around. She has excelled in academics, led prison fellowships and won accolades from the prison administration."

I would say following along in an extremely structured and limited environment is hardly "turning her life around." Dealing with people in the real world, who aren't convicts, or prison professionals is a whole different ball game.Also, how can taking someone who, as a kid, could summon up the premeditated balls to shoot someone in the head, or beat them to death with a bat, and has known nothing since but a lot of convicts with the same M.O. or worse, possibly be a worthwhile candidate for release into civilized society? In prison, the better you are at manipulating others for your own ends, the better you generally do. That's not a good skill to be demonstrating in civilized society, as we've seen over and over again.

And finally, imagine you're a relative of the victim, and you run into his/her murderer at the grocery store? Or worse, the ex con goes a little haywire, and seeks out retribution against family members, or those who helped put him/her in the pen?

We give our old school clannish rights to retribution over to the state, in order to maintain a better, and more orderly society. Before then, the family would have the murderers head on a pike in their front yard. Keeping the murderer in prison is the compromise that maintains the contract between families and the court system. To let out murderers, regardless of age, is a breach of that contract, and unpleasant retributive acts will eventually ensue, which means family members of the victims could wind up doing time in prison, because the courts fell short of making the murderer pay his/her debt to society and the victims families.

There should be no shortened sentences for premeditated murder. It is a move toward anarchy, and undermines the security of the society the court system was intended to protect.

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